Silverlight: What's it for?

[Guest]

Not likely with Firefox and IE supporting different video codecs. But one can dream.

[Cyker]

Well it's possible as H264 has been released royalty free for web use, and if we're lucky WebM will become prolific enough that all browsers will need to support it

But that's not the main thing I mean; Flash started life as a vector graphics animator, but has grown quite a lot from there.

With javascript and svg you can already do a lot of Flash-like stuff, and newer browsers which support things like Canvas tags are getting closer and closer to modern Flash-levels of functionality...

[submix8c]

FWIW, Silverlight is/was used by Netflix for streaming movies. At least it did when my brother got his "free trial of Netflix"...

[JorgeA]

FWIW, Silverlight is/was used by Netflix for streaming movies. At least it did when my brother got his "free trial of Netflix"...

submix8c,

Oh, so I might actually have some use for Silverlight! (Been thinking about joining Netflix.)

I'm glad that you pointed this out, thanks.

--JorgeA

[CoffeeFiend]

Silverlight is used in some places. The sliverlight version of Bing maps is pretty slick (although I use google maps most of the time). It was also used to stream the Bejing and Vancouver olympics. It's also used extensively by Microsoft for all their developer video series (from various events, tutorials, etc)

I hope it dies off

Let's hope not! Flash *needs* competition, otherwise it'll just stagnate, very much like IE6 did. Thanks to Silverlight, we're now seeing a lot of extra features being added to Flash -- things like video decoding acceleration (H.264).

Personally, I hope HTML5 kills off both of them...

And it definitely won't. HTML 5 has support for video which could indeed kill a large chunk of Flash usage on sites like Youtube, but with browsers supporting different codecs the future isn't so simple (most likely serve H.264 to everything that supports it, and H.264-played-by-flash to everything else).

And that doesn't really address the rest of its uses. And no, HTML5-only features like canvas/video/audio tags + SVG + JavaScript + CSS isn't a replacement in many ways (like for dynamic audio in a game) -- nevermind that all of this runs on a very small portion of web browsers right now whereas Flash works with pretty much everything (nevermind the cross-browser quirks).

Also, Flash has a large and active community based around it, a lot of people already know actionscript, it has great development tools for animators, it's easy to use and rapid to develop with, it's a supported output format by a LOT of other tools used by non-animators (like InDesign), etc. Silverlight also has its strong points like being able to reuse existing C# or VB code instead of actionscript. I thought about using silverlight before as you can have pretty amazing user interfaces (on the web) using it (just check out the demos of these controls for example) but I just don't have the time to look into it.

I very much dislike Flash: slow loading, CPU/memory hog, browser crashing, battery draining, where bookmarking or the back button don't work, nor does it let you open links in other tabs, nor can you adjust the text size with ctrl + or -, forget about using ctrl+f to find something, can't save pics, it's not indexing friendly nor really accessible, it doesn't resize with screen resolution like HTML does or at least can, it seems to be used mainly by highly annoying slap-the-monkey style ads that sometimes even have sound, it's not really meant for touch devices, it doesn't run on a lot of mobile devices, it has those flash cookies your browser won't delete, judging by its track record it's a liability (insecure), etc. Most of the time it's just used to add very distracting and somehwat annoying animations all over the place and it just gets in the way of actual content. But unfortunately it's not going away anytime soon. I wish nobody would develop those really, REALLY awful flash-only sites anymore (I know a guy who swears by that and thinks this is the future... you should see his sites ) and I really hope that devices like the iPhone/iPad/etc that don't support flash will help, but for some tasks (e.g. games) it's still the best tool for the job.